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5 Ways to Speed up Windows

You’re Windows based system needn’t slow down over time. Whether your system is now working significantly slower than before or it’s grounded almost to a halt, there are several reasons why this may and does occur.

When it comes to computer issues, a simple reboot is something that should always be on your mind. In most cases, restarting your system is all you need to do to fix the vast majority of problems that may occur on your computer, ruling out having to tinkle around with more complex troubleshooting methods.

1. Find Resource Hungry Applications

Your computer is not running at optimal levels because a significant portion of its resources is being consumed. If your computers performance suddenly took a dip, then there is a strong chance that a Windows process may be consuming close to 99% of CPU resources. Alternatively, the drop in performance may be due to a memory leak, an application consuming a considerable amount of system memory, forcing the computer to use the swap file. You also have those instances when an application is using a considerable amount of disk space, forcing other programs to work much slower, especially when they need to call to disk.

In order to find out which programs and processes are consuming what, you will need to open Windows Task Manager. In order to open this tool, simply right click on the Taskbar and select Open Task Manager.

Once the program has loaded up, click on the Processes Tab, and you will be able to see the applications running on your system, and how much Memory and CPU resources they are consuming. If you find that an application is using up a lot of resources, you can close it, by right clicking on it and selecting End Task.

2. Remove Special Effects

Making the taskbar and Start menu transparent is one option available to you, but for Windows 10 users, there are a number of other built-in special effects, you can take advantage of. In order to strip away all the special effects from your Windows experience, right click on My Computer and select Properties.

On the next screen, click on Advanced System Settings, which will open up System Properties. Then click on the Advanced Tab, and click on Settings under Performance.

When the Performance Options menu loads up, in the Visual Effects Tab, you can either select the option for Best Performance, which will turn off all the unnecessary special effects and animations, or you can choose the Custom Option, and select all the things you feel you do not need. Then click on OK, to apply those changes.

3. Disable Startup Applications

If your computer takes a considerable amount of time to boot up, this could be the result of having too many applications starting during the system boot up phase.

To fix this problem, open the Run Command box, by pressing Windows Key + R. Then type msconfig into it and click on OK. Once Microsoft System Configuration Utility loads up, click on the Startup Tab and then un-tick the box next to any and all applications you do not want starting when you boot up your computer.

Note: You can use Windows Task Manager to monitor which applications use the most resources, and disable applications based on your findings here.

4. Lighten Your Browser

There is a strong chance that you use your web browser quite a lot, so it could just be that your browser is running slower than it once did. To get the best performance out of your browser, its best practice to use fewer add-ons, and extensions, as these tools can adversely affect the performance of the browser.

To remedy this problem, simply enter the Add-ons or Extensions manager area of the browser and remove any and all the add-ons that you no longer need. Enabling click-to-play plug-ins is also a good idea, as this will prevent certain plug-ins from running without your explicit authorization.

5. Scan for Malicious Files

There is a good chance that your system is running slow because malicious files have infected and corrupted it. It may not be only malware, as there are other kinds of software that are capable of interfering with the performance of one’s system, in its attempt to track or add additional ads to it.

To be on the safe side, it would be a good idea for you to scan your computer using your antivirus scanner. You may also want to consider using Malwarebytes or SpyHunter, which are too highly proficient antimalware tools, capable of detecting potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), that your standard antivirus scanner is likely to miss. These PUPs get onto your computer, when you install certain applications, and they are almost always useless.